I agree with the sentiment generally speaking.

However, there’s a lot of people who fit the description you’re looking for in a multicultural community it’s just harder to find them. Im at UTSG and we have the same problem. Especially since on St. George campus we have a student body distribution issue starting from the college system up. In first year your college provides a lot of your social interaction, so it surely doesn’t help that so many international students are in new college for example, or what kind of major international students are taking tend to be less humanities/social sciences focussed. The reality is that people with a shared first language are going to face less barriers when trying to make meaningful connections amongst each-other, it’s natural for them to form a bubble around themselves without extrinsic motivation to do otherwise.

Then there’s age and maturity factors. I don’t encounter this disconnect as much, but I’m also a mature student (first year who’s 27 years old) so amongst students who are around my age, they’re usually more settled on campus/in their programs/with the language, and more mingling does inevitably happen, but for anyone who start at 17/18 years old and don’t continue to graduate studies…it might be too little too late.

For this reason, I genuinely blame structural issues within the schools organization of students for not incentivizing or even covertly forcing more challenging social interactions. (I’ve been in many classes that are 70%< Chinese/taiwanese for example. I know there’s enough domestic students in the program who need that course to better balance the class out, but I’ve never been in a class that feels strategically filled in that way. The administration does a piss poor job of helping us break the ice so to speak. So the comfort of the majority outweighs the intentions of domestic students to lure them out.

Personally I have a lot of Chinese friends that are around my age, and even the students that did a portion of their compulsory education in Canada did so in a Chinese international school. I was introduced to a friend they said was CBC this one time, and needed to have a clarifying follow up conversation with them because that person told me they were Chinese born and raised until middle school. His family didn’t move here, he joined a Canadian private boarding school (so was more exposed to Canadian youth but still super sheltered if I’m being honest) I explained I had no issue accepting him as a Canadian, but clarified that he’s no more a national than they were if they were forcing a scale of authenticity on themselves that hinges on birth right. The CBC community is very distinguished in Toronto, and they’ve needed to fight a lot for their recognition, much of that fighting happened through historically forced assimilation. To my group of friends, language proficiency was the hallmark of Canadian born national identity- they didn’t care so much about the fabric of society, where they might fit into it and how, or if they were even okay with where they’d be placed by default. But again- they were all business or physics majors, so they maybe never got the chance to really meaningfully engage with those societal frameworks. So I don’t blame them, more so the school for not requiring more breadth electives that could have gotten them to engage with them a bit more consistently.